Multimedia content may take the form of one of the three distinct modalities of audio, visual, and textual, or any combination thereof. Content “re-purposing” refers generally and theoretically to re-formatting, re-scaling, and/or transcoding content by changing the content representation within a given domain, such as: from video to video, video to still graphic images, or natural pictures to cartoons in the visual domain; from natural to synthetic sound in the audio domain; and from full text to summaries in the textual domain. In addition, content may be re-purposed by changing from one domain to another, such as from video to text or from audio to text.
A primary use of content re-purposing is to enable the processing, storage, transmission and display of multimedia information on mobile (e.g., wireless) devices. Such devices typically have very stringent limitations on processing, storage, transmission/reception and display capabilities. Through content re-purposing, a mobile device user may have constant access to multimedia information with variable quality depending upon the circumstances, and by using the best available multimedia modality.
Current content re-purposing implementations include primarily speech-to-text, where spoken sounds are analyzed to transform them into vowels and consonants for translation into text to be employed, for example, in answering or response (dial-in) systems. Summarization, which deals almost exclusively with textual information, is also employed.
There is, therefore, a need in the art for improved techniques for content re-purposing directed to more general uses.